Epistemic Responsibility

Lorraine Code

Description

Having adequate knowledge of the world is not just a matter of survival but also one of obligation. This obligation to "know well" is what philosophers have termed "epistemic responsibility." In this innovative and eclectic study, Lorraine Code explores the possibilities inherent in this concept as a basis for understanding human attempts to know and understand the world and for discerning the nature of intellectual virtue. By focusing on the idea that knowing is a creative process guided by imperatives of epistemic responsibility, Code provides a fresh perspective on the theory of knowledge.

From this new perspective, Code poses questions about knowledge that have a different focus from those traditionally raised in the two leading epistemological theories, foundationalism and coherentism. While not rejecting these approaches, this new position moves away from a primary concentration on determinate products and towards an examination of ever-changing processes. Arguing that knowledge never exists as an ungrounded abstraction but rather emerges through dialogue between variously authoritative "knowers" situated within particular social and historical contexts, she draws extensively on examples from lived social experience to illustrate the ways in which human beings have long tried to recognize and meet their epistemic responsibilities.

This edition of Epistemic Responsibility includes a new preface from Lorraine Code.
Preface to the Second Edition
Preface

1. Introduction: Epistemic Responsibility

Part I: Intellectual Virtue

2. Father and Son: A Case Study
Introduction: The Gosse Case
Foundations, Coherence, and Narrative
Some Interim Conclusions

3. Toward a "Responsibilist" Epistemology
"The Raft and the Pyramid"
Epistemological Precedents
Responsibilism
Recommendations

4. The Ethics of Belief
The Ethical and the Epistemic
The Ethics of Belief
Belief and Choice
Implications

Part II: Cognitive Activity

5. The Knowing Subject
Theoretical Basis
Kant cum Piaget: Steps Toward the Personal
Knowers As Persons
Epistemology and Human Nature
Consequences

6. Realism and Understanding
Realism, Truth, and Intellectual Virtue
Normative Realism
Subjectivism and Dogmatism
Understanding
The Lebenswelt: Cognitive Practice

7. Epistemic Community
Community and Commonability
Cognitive Interdependence and Trust
Contracts, Forms of Life, and Practices
Epistemological Altruism
Consequences

Part III: Epistemic Life

8. Literature, Truth, and Understanding
Fiction as a Source of Understanding
Responsibility for Truth
The Case of Styron: The Factual and the Fictional
Implications

9. Cognitive Practice
The Division of Intellectual Labor
Polanyi and/or Foucault
Education, Authority, and the Epistemic Community

10. Conclusion

Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Media studies

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438480510
• Langue: English

Extrait

E PISTEMIC R ESPONSIBILITY
E PISTEMIC
R ESPONSIBILITY

Lorraine Code
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2020 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Code, Lorraine, author.
Title: Epistemic responsibility / Lorraine Code.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press [2020]
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438480527 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438480510 (ebook)
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020943277
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To the memory of my father, who might, I think, have shared some of these concerns
C ONTENTS
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
PREFACE
1 Introduction: Epistemic Responsibility
I Intellectual Virtue
2 Father and Son : A Case Study
Introduction: The Gosse Case
Foundations, Coherence, and Narrative
Some Interim Conclusions
3 Toward a “Responsibilist” Epistemology
“The Raft and the Pyramid”
Epistemological Precedents
Responsibilism
Recommendations
4 The Ethics of Belief
The Ethical and the Epistemic
The Ethics of Belief
Belief and Choice
Implications
II Cognitive Activity
5 The Knowing Subject
Theoretical Basis
Kant cum Piaget: Steps Toward the Personal
Knowers As Persons
Epistemology and Human Nature
Consequences
6 Realism and Understanding
Realism, Truth, and Intellectual Virtue
Normative Realism
Subjectivism and Dogmatism
Understanding
The Lebenswelt: Cognitive Practice
7 Epistemic Community
Community and Commonability
Cognitive Interdependence and Trust
Contracts, Forms of Life, and Practices
Epistemological Altruism
Consequences
III Epistemic Life
8 Literature, Truth, and Understanding
Fiction as a Source of Understanding
Responsibility for Truth
The Case of Styron: The Factual and the Fictional
Implications
9 Cognitive Practice
The Division of Intellectual Labor
Polanyi and/or Foucault
Education, Authority, and the Epistemic Community
10 Conclusion
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
P REFACE TO THE S ECOND E DITION
I begin with a certain temerity on an autobiographical note, sketching some of the reasons that prompted me to write a book called Epistemic Responsibility in the 1980s, after completing a PhD with a dissertation titled “Knowledge and Subjectivity.” The dissertation topic did not lead directly into thoughts about epistemic responsibility since the concept was not then so central a part of the philosophical lexicon as it briefly came to be, and as it is again reclaiming explanatory space. Yet a rigorous if shortlived exchange assessing its “scope and limits,” in the late 1970s and early 1980s, prompted me to take it up in ways its then-articulators subsequently ceased to pursue, perhaps for reasons of its apparent fluidity, its lack of conceptual rigor, and/or its uneasy fit within then-current epistemological orthodoxy. For my work, it was the missing piece in a range of issues I was thinking about without having the conceptual resources to articulate them.
Briefly to rehearse some moments in a relatively short-lived debate in Anglo-American philosophy then, consider the following: In 1974, asking “How Do You Know?” Ernest Sosa suggests that on occasion, a resort to neglectful data collection resulting in lack of knowledge, “could be traced back to epistemic irresponsibility”: to substandard performance attributable to the investigator. 1 More centrally inspirational for how I continued is Laurence Bonjour’s 1978 observation: “Cognitive doings are epistemically justified, on this conception, only if and to the extent that they are aimed at this goal—which means roughly that one accepts all and only beliefs which one has good reason to think are true. To accept a belief in the absence of such a reason, however appealing or even mandatory such acceptance may be from other standpoints, is to neglect the pursuit of truth; such an acceptance is, one might say, epistemically irresponsible . My contention is that the idea of being epistemically responsible is the core concept of epistemic justification.” 2 Yet, according to Hilary Kornblith, Bonjour is presupposing that there is a free choice of belief: thus, that fulfilling one’s epistemic responsibilities is a matter of following certain rules of ideal reasoning: an assumption he rejects. 3 Nevertheless, he argues persuasively in favour of judging epistemic conduct responsible or irresponsible: he is a principal contributor to this line of thinking. In this 1983 essay, Kornblith suggests that often when someone wonders whether a belief is justified , she/he is asking, “whether the belief is the product of epistemically responsible action. ” Such questions, he notes, are about the ethics of belief. He stops short, however, of claiming that beliefs are freely chosen tout court , concentrating rather on questions about how “truth seekers ought to comport themselves.”
Referring to the epistemically responsible agent, he argues: “It is not that one has a choice in the beliefs that one forms, but that one has a say in the procedures one undertakes that lead to their formation.” Hence, he is critical of an epistemological focus on proper reasoning to the exclusion of considering how evidence is gathered; maintaining that being epistemically responsible is about engaging in appropriate knowledge-seeking procedures. Similarly, John Heil focuses on a tension between regarding believers as active doxastic agents who are responsible for what they believe, and believers as being “at the mercy of their belief-forming equipment”: as passive. 4 He concludes that a need to avoid voluntarism in knowledge/belief formation leaves space for speaking of epistemic responsibility and agency only if the focus shifts to the ways in which “agents … select belief-generating procedures” (p. 363).
As this small sampling indicates, discussions of epistemic responsibility did claim a place, then, in mainstream American epistemology. Perhaps they failed to play a more central part in consequence of their uneasy positioning in relation to the post-positivist rigor that continued to govern epistemology, or in consequence of their departure from deductive-nomological analysis. More plausible an explanation is/was their stark individualism , which sustains settled practices of failing to take subjectivity into account. 5 It is difficult—even incongruous—to talk about responsibilities in relation to knowing chairs and tables, even though in some situations it may matter. Nevertheless, once knowledge seeking is recognized as a cooperative-collaborative, textured human practice, it is vital to keep in mind Anne Seller’s emblematic affirmation: “As an isolated individual, I often do not know what my experiences are.” 6 These, in condensed form, are among the ideas that, in my view, affirmed the centrality of such issues.
In writing Epistemic Responsibility in the 1980s, I was attempting to fill a gap I could neither name nor describe—a gap where evaluative and interpretive judgements could find no place, seemingly because they could not “boil down” to simple true-or-false empirical propositional claims; nor did they admit of true-or-false evaluations—say, of nuance or relevance. Most crucially, inquiry that starts from (perhaps tacit) questions about epistemic responsibility requires engaging with subjectivity/subjectivities: it is about working to understand, assessing and (often hermeneutically) engaging with issues about the place of subjectivity/subjectivities in knowledge-making, -constructing, and -evaluating processes. It is about the ethics and politics of knowledge, and indeed about epistemic subjectivity in its multiple modalities. Moreover, given that talk of responsibility in its literal modalities commonly, if implicitly, refers to human agency, it clearly requires what I have called “Taking Subjectivity Into Account”: 7 starting from understandings of epistemic subjectivity/subjectivities more diverse and more complex than that of the standard, unidentified occupant of the S place, in “ S knows that p ” assertions allows. My aim was to claim space for the concept and the practices it could inform in knowledge acquisition, development, evaluation, and circulation by bringing the epistemic subject out of hiding: 8 acknowledging the incongruity embedded in habits of working from a systemic failure to recognize that talk about responsibility without directing adequate attention to the knower(s) —to the potentially responsible or irresponsible epistemic agents involved—is indeed futile.
Space did have to be claimed, for in the then (and often still now) “instituted” Anglo-American epistemic imaginary, talk about responsible epistemic conduct and its implications for knowing well was conceptually at odds with received approaches to established epistemic practice. 9 This incongruity is apparent in the examples I have cited from epistemologists who were working on such issues, then. In an entr